In the end, Peter still gave Ethan his address.
He had never been very good at refusing people.
Besides, in Peter’s eyes, Ethan was still a good person.
Even if this good person felt a little… strange.
Now that he had Peter Parker’s address, Ethan had no reason to linger at Midtown High any longer.
Ignoring the astonished looks from the students around him, Ethan climbed over the wall and left the campus.
He hadn’t been joking when he said he was going to scavenge trash.
He was dead serious about it.
He hadn’t spent long in the wasteland yet—or rather, he still hadn’t truly experienced real wasteland living.
But Ethan guessed it definitely wasn’t the kind of place where you lived in comfort and wanted for nothing.
As a wasteland scavenger in training, picking through trash was a core survival skill!
Even after traveling to another world, he couldn’t neglect this specialized training.
Back in his previous life, the people around him had all said Ethan had mental problems.
Ethan had always scoffed at that, utterly unwilling to agree.
His thinking was this clear—how could anyone say he had mental problems? It was downright slander!
…
Just after leaving Midtown High, Ethan was walking along the roadside when a biker on a Harley pulled over ahead of him, planning to buy some contraband from a street punk on the sidewalk.
“Whoa! Well i’ll be damned! A Harley nobody wants! Man, I’m good. Even my scavenging skills are top-tier.”
Ethan walked over to the Harley with complete natural ease and swung a leg over it, as if the bike really were ownerless.
“Give me the strong stuff.”
The biker had only just spoken to the dealer when he suddenly heard the familiar rumble of his Harley’s engine starting up behind him.
“What?!”
The biker jerked around in shock.
And there he saw it—a guy in a blue one-piece uniform had started his motorcycle.
To a real biker, his motorcycle was even more important than his wife.
For Ethan to get on it without permission was basically no different from sleeping with the man’s wife right in front of him!
The cuckolded biker instantly went red-eyed with rage.
“Get off my bike, you fucking bastard!”
“First come, first served. I found this trash first, so it’s mine.”
Ethan looked perfectly matter-of-fact as he spoke. At the same time, he kicked up the stand, pulled the clutch, shifted gears, twisted the throttle, and shot off on the bike in one smooth motion.
Vroom, vroom, vroom—!
The Harley roared away like an untamed horse.
In no time at all, it had vanished into the dense traffic.
“My bike! Hey! My bike!”
“Swellow! Swellow! Swellow! How am I supposed to live without you?!”
The biker instantly put on a mask of agony and sprinted after Ethan, his cries heartbreakingly tragic.
Hearing the familiar line, Ethan glanced into the rearview mirror at the biker chasing after him, a puzzled look crossing his face.
Then he looked down and saw the English word “Swellow” painted on the Harley’s gas tank.
Ethan immediately understood.
So the bike’s name was Swellow. In that case, no problem.
He twisted the throttle hard.
The engine let out a furious roar, and the Harley sped off even faster.
“That’s my new bike! Take it easy on her! Take it easy!”
Watching Ethan disappear farther and farther into the distance, the biker could only let out the howl of a beaten loser!
Unfortunately for him, Ethan was already far away and couldn’t hear a thing.
As mentioned before, Ethan had always had an excellent memory. He could remember almost everything he’d ever seen.
Even though he had never been to New York, he still knew a lot about it.
He already had a plan for how to scavenge in New York.
You know America had scavengers too—and plenty of them.
They wandered through streets and alleys, collecting discarded recyclables and selling them off.
Among those, plastic bottles and aluminum cans were the easiest to sell.
Some brand-name ones, especially those labeled with New York State markings, could usually be taken to specific recycling points for five cents apiece.
And if no recycling point would take them, they could still be sold to a scrapyard.
Roughly four-plus pounds of bottles could fetch around ten bucks.
The various supermarket recycling points had too many restrictions. Even though their per-item rates were decent, they were still more trouble than they were worth.
So Ethan gave up on that option altogether and decided to focus on selling everything directly to a scrapyard.
He was going to be staying in this world for quite a while, so earning himself some living expenses was a must.
It had to be said—Ethan adapted incredibly quickly.
After riding to the back entrance of a supermarket, he found a relatively clean dumpster and pulled several large black trash bags out of it.
He opened the bags, dumped out the garbage inside, and kept the clean ones.
He would need those later to hold all the recyclables he picked up.
He didn’t ignore the dumped-out trash either.
Digging through it, he found a pair of pink gloves and put them on himself.
After all, if he was going to be rummaging through dumpsters, it was always better to wear gloves.
Some dumpsters didn’t just have garbage in them—they also had dangerous stuff like needles and blades, so he had to be careful not to get hurt.
“Oh? They threw away a backpack this nice? Tsk tsk, so wasteful.”
Besides the gloves, Ethan also found a black backpack that looked to be in excellent condition.
Without a second thought, he slung it onto his back.
Using a window’s reflection to check himself out, Ethan nodded in satisfaction.
Very good. He was looking more and more like a proper scavenger now.
Backpack on, trash bags in hand, Ethan found a place to park the motorcycle, then officially began his scavenging work.
Ethan was a diligent scavenger.
He didn’t care in the slightest about the strange looks people on the street gave him.
Once he started picking through recyclables, Ethan discovered that the process was strangely addictive.
Watching the plastic bottles pile up in his bags gave him an involuntary sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.
He suddenly understood why some people liked hoarding cardboard and plastic bottles.
…
On his first day in the world of Spider-Man, Ethan spent the entire afternoon collecting two huge bags full of plastic bottles.
Before the scrapyard closed, he rode the Harley there and sold off everything he had gathered that afternoon.
Total earnings: $23.52.
Holding the receipt the worker handed him, Ethan walked over to the cashier booth and exchanged it for cash with the man inside.
From that man, Ethan also learned something.
If you sold more than a hundred dollars’ worth of scrap in a single transaction, you could give them an ID and have the money deposited straight into your bank account.
But Ethan was a transmigrator. Like any other illegal entrant, he had no legal identity in the United States, and naturally no bank account either.
The worker had probably seen Ethan arrive on a Harley and assumed he was just selling off recyclables he had piled up at home. It likely never even occurred to him that Ethan was actually undocumented.
And Ethan was sharp.
He instantly caught the implication behind the worker’s words.
At once, he felt profoundly insulted!
He glared furiously at the middle-aged man who had just handed him the money. “Please respect my identity and profession!”
“I am a genuine undocumented person with absolutely no legal identity! I have never paid a single cent in taxes to the U.S. government, and I only arrived here today to become a professional scavenger! If you praise me for having talent at picking through trash, I’ll be very happy. But if you think I’m the sort of person who actually has legal status, then I can only take that as an insult!”
Having said that, Ethan was just about to leave when he paused, thought for a moment, then came back and added to the utterly stunned man, “Oh, right. I’m also a divorced single mother with two kids.”
“Hoh!”
Hearing Ethan’s final declaration, the man instantly straightened in solemn admiration.
“My apologies for the offense, beautiful lady!”
He hurriedly took off his hat, revealing a balding head.
Only then did Ethan nod in satisfaction at the scrapyard man’s reaction.
With the enormous fortune of $23.52 in his pocket, he happily got back on the Harley and rode off.
It was already late.
He needed to sort out dinner, then find somewhere to stay for the night.
Thank heavens.
Thanks to the information explosion of the internet age in his previous life, combined with his absurdly good memory,
Ethan already had a plan for where to spend the night.
At around seven in the evening, Ethan rode up in front of a pizza shop.
The moment he got off the bike, a familiar figure appeared right outside the pizza place.
The second Ethan saw him, he grinned.
It was Peter Parker in a work vest. Looks like the two of them really were fated to keep running into each other!
T/N: uhhh hmmmm this guys seems pretty normal yeah and am i the only one who feels bad for the harley guy :sob: IGAHIRHIAHIFHASFKH LIKE HELLO? he was getting drugs though… BUT STILL WIAHIDAHDASFJASKALJFLSJALKFJAKLSFASHFIOASHFIASL anyway bro is a professionalllllllll
This is a fan translation of 死后变强：我在诸天世界作死不止 by 帅牛大人 Rights to the original work belong to the creator. Please support them by exploring their original work or sharing it with others if you can. Thank you for reading and supporting my efforts to bring this story to a wider audience!
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